3 ms·
I don't think much of this writing style. What's the tor attack surface? Are all the tor boxes on the internet backdoored by the NSA? Is tor a honeypot or is t
by photochemsyn 3y ago
I don't think much of this writing style. What's the tor attack surface? Are all the tor boxes on the internet backdoored by the NSA? Is tor a honeypot or is tor not a honeypot?
As far as I can tell tor was designed by spooks to allow remote agents operating in foreign countries a means to communicate with headquarters without being traced. It was never designed to allow two entities to communicate anonymously. The metadata always gets exposed, doesn't it?
Using tor also violates the hide in plain view principle, which all real spooks adhere to religiously.
- throwaway48476 3y agoThere was a guy in a dorm who thought he was anonymous using tor on the schools website. They caught him because it turns out he was the only one using tor. In some ways it is a honeypot.
- Capricorn2481 3y agoWhich story is this? I've heard a few famous stories of people getting caught using Tor, but none that were like this.
- etc-hosts 3y agohttps://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/17/student-charged-bomb-threat/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/17/student-charge...
- Capricorn2481 3y agoYeah, that's the one I meant. It would've been fine if he was the only one using Tor, but: - Guerilla mail let the FBI know it was being accessed with Tor (or they saw it in the email header) - You have to login to use Harvard wifi with your student account, which means they could see who was using Tor. If anything, Harvard wifi is the honeypot.
- etc-hosts 3y agoI think the takeaway from this is you can hide your origin from a web server, but if you use an uncommon pathway to the server, your traffic sticks out. My memory of this case is that Harvard was able to easily determine who had recently used tor, possibly through netflow logs. Same sort of thing used to happen with Signal traffic to their servers in AWS. I've been in countries where Signal does not work at all because the local government blocked Signal traffic after lobbying from companies that profit from expensive SMS charges. I've read privacy activists stress that it's great that e2e encryption exists, but that intelligence agencies are mostly interested in the metadata (who you communicate with, how you communicate with them).
- Capricorn2481 2y agoCompletely
- Bu9818 3y agoThe take away of that story is: don't post a message from Tor that gives out the network that you're entering Tor from.
- LinuxBender 3y agoHe should have run tor from a VPS node and then created a SSH socks tunnel to reach it. It's common to see SSH sessions and large packets flowing through it could easily be SFTP. Even if someone should suspect anything it's still plausible deniability.